Cod_ A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World - Mark Kurlansky [15]
From Newfoundland to southern New England, there is a series of shallow areas called banks, the southernmost being Georges Bank off of Massachusetts, which is larger than the state. Several large banks off of Newfoundland and Labrador are together called the Grand Banks. The largest of the Grand Banks, known as the Grand Bank, is larger than Newfoundland. These are huge shoals on the edge of the North American continental shelf. The area is rich in phytoplankton, a growth produced from the nitrates stirred up by the conflicting currents. Zooplankton, tiny sea creatures, gorge themselves on the phytoplankton. Tiny shrimplike free-floating creatures called krill eat the zooplankton. Herring and other midwater species rise to eat the krill near the surface, and seabirds dive for both the krill and the fish. Humpback whales also feed on krill. And it is this rich environment on the banks that produces cod by the millions. In the North Sea, the cod grounds are also found on banks, but the North American banks, where the waters of the Gulf of Mexico meet the arctic Greenland waters, had a greater density of cod than anything ever seen in Europe. This was the Basques’ secret.
Still more good news for the fishermen, a female cod forty inches (102 centimeters) long can produce three million eggs in a spawning. A fish ten inches longer can produce nine million eggs. A cod may live to be twenty or even thirty years old, but it is the size more than the age that determines its fecundity. Dumas’s image of all the eggs hatching so that someone could walk across the ocean on the backs of cod is typical nineteenth-century enthusiasm about the abundance of the species. But it could never happen. In the order of nature, a cod produces such a quantity of eggs precisely because so few will reach maturity. The free-floating eggs are mostly destroyed as they are tossed around the ocean’s surface, or they are eaten by other species. After a couple of weeks, the few surviving eggs hatch and hungrily feed, first on phytoplankton and soon zooplankton and then krill. That is, if they can get to those foods before the other fish, birds, and whales. The few cod larvae that are not eaten or starved in the first three weeks will grow to about an inch and a half. The little transparent fish, called juveniles, then leave the upper ocean and begin their life on the bottom, where they look for gravel and other rough surfaces in which to hide from their many predators, including hungry adult cod. A huge crop of eggs is necessary for a healthy class, as biologists call them, of juveniles. If each female cod in a lifetime of millions of eggs produces two juveniles that live to be sexually mature adults, the population is stable. The first year is the hardest to survive. After that, the cod has few predators and many prey. Because a cod will eat most anything, it adapts its diet to local conditions, eating mollusks in the Gulf of Maine, and herring, capelin, and squid in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The Atlantic cod is particularly resistant to parasites and diseases, far more so than haddock and whiting.
If ever there was a fish made to endure, it is the Atlantic cod—the common fish. But it has among its predators man, an openmouthed species greedier than cod.
THE WELL-COOKED HEAD
Hannah Glasse’s recipes show how much has been lost from the craft of British cooking, especially the art of roasting. A century after Glasse, French food writer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote, “You may be born to cook, but you must learn to roast.”
TO ROAST A COD’S HEAD
Wash it very clean, and Score it with a Knife, strew a little Salt on it, and lay it in a Stew-pan before the Fire, with something behind it, that the Fire may Roast it. All the Water that comes from it the first half Hour, throw away; then throw on it a little Nutmeg, Cloves, and Mace beat fine, and Salt; flour it, and baste it with Butter. When that has lain Some time, turn it, and